Since I am from Generation X and am not a Millennial,
I can remember a time when the internet wasn’t there. There weren’t any cell phones;
you called each other on land lines. Financial transactions were taken care of by
means of cash or check. Credit cards did exist, but they were laid into a
mechanical device that inked the card number onto a form that you signed, and
it was sent in to the credit card companies. I could go on, but what I’m trying
to get at is how society and our identities have changed in the last twenty
years. And for anyone reading this that is younger than thirty, let me tell
you; it has changed drastically.
I’m not going to go too far into the obvious, or
that everything is digital now days and big corporations like Facebook and
Google are mining our information like crazy and selling it to the highest
bidder. What I want to look at is the more subtle ways our information is being
mined. A good example is the other day, as I was going through the line at
Shopko, they asked me if I had a Shopko card, to which I replied no. Of course
I get the speech about how I could get discounts and what not. At that point I
looked at the cashier all confused and said that my roommate has a card and you
send him crummy coupons about twice a year; I can save more money going to
Sioux Falls once a month, so I don’t really want the card. As I was walking out
of the store it hit me. They run that card every time you purchase something so
they can build an identity for you and track your buying habits. And people
thought they were going to get good deals with the card; what a fallacy.
To coincide with the subtle ways in which we are
tracked and identified, I watched the movie Erasing David, a documentary about
a man named David Bond who wanted to see if two private investigators could
track him down by using his digital footprint. From what I saw in this film, it
was the insignificant things that we do every day and don’t think about that
provide more of an online identity for us. These are things like using our club
cards, sending a text or email, using our EZ Pass to navigate toll roads, and
even setting up appointments at the doctor’s office. All of these little
tidbits of information are online and stored in thousands of different
databases. Like it was said in the film, it isn’t one small piece of
information that can identify you, but it is the combined information from
these different sources that gives you your own identity online.
The scariest
part of this all, is we are being monitored at all times, and certain things
can be flagged in the database and we are instantly labeled “at risk.” We have
been reading about this in one of my other classes, Society and Technology. In
his book Everyday Surveillance, William G. Staples talks about how our online
identities are monitored by different agencies. If there is anything that
stands out as bad behavior, we are instantly profiled as being at risk, which
in turn increases the likelihood that we will be monitored with even more
scrutiny (Staples 31).
To add even more flame to the fire, I found an
article on the website marketplace.org called “A Day in the Life of a Data
Mined Kid,” written by Adrien Hill, that deals with how intensely our school
children are being monitored. In this article, Hill interviews Jose Ferreira,
the CEO of an education software company called Knewton. According to Ferreira,
Knewton has, “five orders of magnitude more information about our school kids
than Google has” (Hill). Knowing how
much data Google mines, I’d say that’s a lot. But the thing is, they monitor
their every move while at school, and even computer usage outside of the
school. They track their movements, their academic progress, their behavioral
progress, even their physical fitness. I see two major problems with this.
First of all, with all this information in one place, could you imagine what
could happen if the information got into the wrong hands? It wouldn’t be good.
But the other, and more major, problem is if there is a behavioral or social
problem with any child, that child could also be profiled as “at risk,” which
may follow him or her through the rest of their school years, and even beyond.
What it comes down to is mistakes can be made in our
lives, and mistakes can be made in databases. The reality of modern life is we
are socially profiled by use of databases. In some cases the information will
always be there and it can haunt us for the rest of our lives; hence we are
guilty until proven innocent. And there I thought the Spanish Inquisition and
the Salem Witch Trials were a thing of the past.
For a neat infographic on how school children are
tracked click here.
Works Cited
Hill,
Adriene. “A Day in the Life of a Data Mined Kid.” Marketplace. 15 September, 2014. Web. 3 October 2014. < http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learningcurve/day-life-data-mined-kid>
Staples, William G. “Everyday Surveillance” Lanham,
Maryland. Rowan and Littlefield. 2014.
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